January 11, 2006 – 11:16 pm
A recurring theme in here, and in some of the blogs I’m fond of visiting, is the mystery of consciousness. How is it that “mere” matter can become self-aware? Canmatter be the engine of consciousness at all, or does it merely serve as a temporary and intermittent host?
There seem to be three avenues by which people approach this mystery – philosophy, science, and mysticism. I have the intuitive conviction that they will, ultimately, give consistent answers – in other words they are all three digging toward the same hidden truth, though from different directions, and with different tools. My wish is to try to follow the progress on all three fronts, and to participate actively where I can.
January 1, 2006 – 11:32 pm
One of my favorite books is the astonishingly imaginative Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas R. Hofstadter. This Pulitzer-Prize-winning book, published in 1979, is an extended meditation upon the underlying connections between the work of the three men mentioned in the title – Johann Sebastian Bach (who needs no introduction), the Dutch graphic artist M.C. Escher, and mathematician Kurt Gödel. It is hard to describe the tone and content of the book – it is at times witty and playful, at times dense and didactic, but always unflaggingly, utterly brilliant. Really, and I mean this, GEB is so startlingly clever and original that at times it quite literally – and I do not ever misuse the word “literally” – took my breath away.
December 28, 2005 – 12:24 am
Educational and psychological theories of the mid-20th century saw the human brain as an infinitely flexible learning machine, with no “factory presets”. But the picture that is now emerging of our mental apparatus is of a suite of prewired cognitive modules, located in various areas of the brain, each of which has been shaped by natural selection for some useful task. These modules provide us with a common a priori framework for organizing our model of the world, and each module contributes an intuitive description of some aspect of our environment.
December 27, 2005 – 1:46 am
“Just as a monkey roaming through the forest grabs hold of one branch, lets that go and grabs another, then lets that go and grabs still another, so too that which is called ‘mind’ and ‘mentality’ and ‘consciousness’ arises as one thing and ceases as another by day and by night.â€
(Connected Discourses of the Buddha, p. 595)
December 7, 2005 – 11:45 pm
A common idea in esoteric teachings is the notion that we live our lives too mechanically, that we are in fact in a kind of waking sleep. The notion seems silly at first. Of course we aren’t asleep! Sleep is what we do at night in our beds. During our busy days we are conscious, we are active, we are engaged. But consciousness is a tricky business, and one of its sneakier properties is that it can’t see its own edges. To put that another way, it takes consciousness to be aware of consciousness, and that means that unconsciousness cannot be aware of itself.
November 20, 2005 – 11:59 pm
Are there abstract objects? Do numbers, for example, have an existence that is independent of our minds? This is one of the Big Questions, and has been a recent topic of debate over at Maverick Philosopher, where I have been outnumbered as usual. It’s a pretty tough room for materialists, that place.
What, exactly, have we been wrangling over? Consider the following proposition:
The statement “3 is prime” was true even before there were any minds to conceive it.
Is this true? Bill Vallicella and company say it is (and seemed a bit shocked that I might think otherwise), but I think the question is more subtle that they realize, and doesn’t have a simple yes-or-no answer. Here’s the view I am proposing:
November 6, 2005 – 2:45 am
I’ve been spending a lot of time over at Bill Vallicella’s place lately, as anyone who reads these posts is bound to have noticed. We’ve been arguing dualism vs. phsyicalism, and the fur has been flying. Here’s a recap. I apologize if this post is of rather unseemly length.
November 5, 2005 – 5:01 pm
As I walked along William Street in Lower Manhattan yesterday morning on my way to the PubSub command center, I noticed out of the corner of my eye a dazzling light twenty feet or so off the ground. Looking up at it I couldn’t make out what it was for a moment, then realized that it was only a metal fixture attached to a building. It wasn’t really any sort of lamp at all, but was catching a thin shaft of sunlight (the streets are narrow, and the buildings tall, in the Financial District) and bouncing it my way. This was an interesting perceptive shift; at first I had thought I was seeing a primary light source, then realized that its illuminative virtue was not intrinsic but contextual.
I was immediately struck by what an apt metaphor this was for the topic of derived vs. intrinsic intentionality.
October 27, 2005 – 11:35 pm
For many years I have been curious about consciousness. It is something that most people never think much about, but when you begin to wonder about it it is hard to let the subject go. Consciousness is at the same time the most familiar phenomenon there is, and the oddest of all. We give it up every night and regain it each morning, without wondering how such a change might be possible. We know that consciousness is bound, somehow, to our bodies (and, we assume, not to the ordinary objects of the world), but we cannot begin to imagine how such a binding might be arranged. Consciousness can be aware of itself, but unconsciousness cannot, and so we do not see the “edges” of our consciousness, as we can demonstrate by trying to observe ourselves in the act of falling asleep. Our experiences of our lives in the fleeting present, and of the memories that are all we have of the past, are dependent for their very existence upon our our consciousness.
As reader of these pages will know, I follow quite closely the conversation at Bill Vallicella’s Maverick Philosopher website. Lately Bill has treated his visitors to a good hard look at the philosophical treatment of several aspects of consciousness, such as qualia, dualism-vs.-physicalism, and intentionality. I highly recommend his site to any readers who are curious about the various views that animate this discussion; Bill’s blog is a rara avis in philosophical discourse: simultaneously scholarly, engaging, and accessible. He also attracts a respectable ensemble of readers and commenters.
October 17, 2005 – 4:07 pm
We can stop arguing about the existence of qualia, thanks to Sony.
Somebody should send Daniel Dennett one of these.
September 21, 2005 – 12:44 am
A lively discussion has been going on over at Bill Vallicella’s website. I seem to be spending so much time over there, in such engaging company, that I am getting very little done in here!
One of the topics we’ve been grappling with is the physicalist view of the mind. As you might have guessed from previous posts, I hold the view that our minds are entirely grounded in the physical world: that all of our thoughts, memories, fears,imaginings, etc. – in short, our inner lives – are the result of the activity of our physical bodies, in particular our nervous systems. We are a long way from completing the scientific program that will exhaustively map subjective experience onto objectively measurable physical states and transactions, but I do believe, along with most scientists studying the problem, that the idea is sound, and the goal attainable, in principle at least. But this view, all but hegemonic among research scientists, has met considerable resistance in the philosophical community. A recent posting at Dr. Vallicella’s site sums it up:
Marvelously complex as it is, the brain is just another chunk of the physical world. Study it till doomsday with the most sophisticated instruments, map every cubic millimeter of it, establish detailed correlations between brain regions and types of conscious phenomena — and what do you accomplish? You learn more and more about a highly complex piece of meat.